Now, this last is in line with our theme of Our Friends the Integers, so we nursed a fragile hope, despite the precedent of the flat and mindless use of supposedly numinous numbers on “Lost” (along with the downspiral of that initially eye-pleasing series into rank incoherence). And despite the disappointment of last year’s Rubicon, which shares some motifs, and showed a glimmer of promise; but all eyes were dry when the series was canceled.

So, “Touch”… How is it? (Or rather: Was it; for I shall not be watching again.)

First, I am pleased to report, the show once again exemplifies the sort of linguistic fidelity that would have been unimaginable on television during the years when I was growing up -- for them, no more than a fake/comedic ‘German’ accent, and an occasional ‘French’ ooh-la-la. The scenes set in Iraq (which were the best, or least-worst, to my taste) were staged, not merely in Arabic, but in authentic Iraqi dialect.

For the rest, you may sift the rubble without turning up any trinket of interest.

For one thing, there were incredibly many vastly annoying ads. Does not Fox know that, for the Season Premiere, you’re supposed to first sucker-in an audience, get them hooked, and only later melt their minds to the consistency of Twinkie-filling?

But the main thing: There’s just nothing there. Anyone can toss up a bunch of unlikely co-incidences and go Ooooooh. As a rule, implausible coincidences count as a weakness of a plot. To turn these into a strength requires a very skilled hand indeed. Thomas Pynchon did a decent job of it in The Crying of Lot 49 (though I enjoyed that book much more as an adolescent, than I did when I re-read it as an adult). The shallow minds that put this mess together show no such skill.

~

It is furthermore possible -- though I shall not be tracking this to see -- that the series may develop in the direction of Disability Porn. There is a lengthy tradition of exploitative uplift, giving false hope to the suffering (whose cognitive faculties, understandably, are trumped by their emotions), e.g. “Lorenzo’s Oil.” (I would link to Wikipedia, yet, remarkably, neither the English nor French nor German versions make any follow-up reference as to whether the stuff actually works. Judge for yourself:

The direction the series might take is actually even more catagogic, suggesting that your autistic child may actually have nothing wrong with him at all, he is just “differently abled”, in fact a geeenius, who can foil terrorist attacks halfway around the globe with a blink of his eyelids.

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The first novel-length story featuring the Murphy Bros.

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

It contains stories previously published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as new stories never before published. Click the cover to download it to your Kindle now!

About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.